To Lafayette Philadelphia, June 16, 1792

-- Behold you, then, my dear friend, at the head of a great army,
establishing the liberties of your country against a foreign enemy.
May heaven favor your cause, and make you the channel thro' which it
may pour it's favors. While you are exterminating the monster
aristocracy, & pulling out the teeth & fangs of it's associate
monarchy, a contrary tendency is discovered in some here. A sect has
shewn itself among us, who declare they espoused our new
constitution, not as a good & sufficient thing itself, but only as a
step to an English constitution, the only thing good & sufficient in
itself, in their eye. It is happy for us that these are preachers
without followers, and that our people are firm & constant in their
republican purity. You will wonder to be told that it is from the
Eastward chiefly that these champions for a king, lords & commons
come. They get some important associates from New York, and are
puffed off by a tribe of Agioteurs which have been hatched in a bed
of corruption made up after the model of their beloved England. Too
many of these stock jobbers & king-jobbers have come into our
legislature, or rather too many of our legislature have become stock
jobbers & king-jobbers. However the voice of the people is beginning
to make itself heard, and will probably cleanse their seats at the
ensuing election. -- The machinations of our old enemies are such as
to keep us still at bay with our Indian neighbors. -- What are you
doing for your colonies? They will be lost if not more effectually
succoured. Indeed no future efforts you can make will ever be able
to reduce the blacks. All that can be done in my opinion will be to
compound with them as has been done formerly in Jamaica. We have
been less zealous in aiding them, lest your government should feel
any jealousy on our account. But in truth we as sincerely wish their
restoration, and their connection with you, as you do yourselves. We
are satisfied that neither your justice nor their distresses will
ever again permit their being forced to seek at dear & distant
markets those first necessaries of life which they may have at
cheaper markets placed by nature at their door, & formed by her for
their support. -- What is become of Mde de Tessy and Mde de Tott? I
have not heard of them since they went to Switzerland. I think they
would have done better to have come & reposed under the Poplars of
Virginia. Pour into their bosoms the warmest effusions of my
friendship & tell them they will be warm and constant unto death.
Accept of them also for Mde de la Fayette & your dear children -- but
I am forgetting that you are in the field of war, & they I hope in
those of peace.